Service Unit Operators, Oil and Gas Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Service Unit Operators, Oil and Gas ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $47,330. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

With 44,120 jobs nationally, Service Unit Operators, Oil and Gas make up 0.03% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 16,900 of those jobs, the top three states hold 53.0%, and the deepest concentration sits in North Dakota (location quotient 25.40, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $47,330 at the 25th percentile, $57,980 at the middle, $70,510 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $53,810, a ratio of 2.3 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 16,900 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Alaska would lead at $98,930. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Service Unit Operators, Oil and Gas stands number 408 by employment and number 442 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Construction and Extraction Occupations, the group median wage is $54,660 across 60 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 6% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 9 of the 27 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $57,980, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 5,740 jobs, 13.0% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $50,750 a year, against $73,940 in Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $57,980 works out to $4,832 a month before taxes, $2,230 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,115 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,330) to the 75th ($70,510) is worth $23,180 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $63,778 would sit between the median ($57,980) and the 75th percentile ($70,510), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,330, is $10,650 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Construction and Extraction Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining, Pipelayers, Miscellaneous Construction and Related Workers, Septic Tank Servicers and Sewer Pipe Cleaners, Solar Photovoltaic Installers, Insulation Workers, Mechanical. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.